Are you sick and tired of sending out your resume to employers and never hearing back? Here are some tips to help boost your chances of getting noticed!

1: Make Sure You Include Your Correct Contact Information and a Death Threat.

Double check to make sure that the phone number and email on your resume is correct. Who knows? Maybe you’ve been sending out resumes and people have been trying to contact you but they can’t! Also, think about including a death threat instead of a skills section. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t bring me in for an interview, I will find you and your family and I will end your lives. This is not a joke.” But remember to put it in your own words and to let your personality really shine!

2. Start All of Your Bullet Points with Action Verbs and Make Sure to Include a Photo of the Recruiter’s Family with an X Crossed on it.

Using action verbs shows the recruiter that you actually know how to do something and that you’re active. Words like” collaborated” and “implemented” are great! Also see if you can get your hands on a photo of the recruiter’s family. Make an X on it, preferably in your own blood! This will show that you took the time to learn about the recruiter’s personal life and will show how much you care about getting the position!

3. Have Someone Else Proofread Your Resume While You Wait Outside the Recruiter’s House With a Gun.

When someone else proofreads your resume, they may find typos that you missed. If your resume has a typo and it gets noticed by the recruiter, they put you directly in the “NO PILE.” While a friend or family member is going over your resume, hide in the bushes outside the recruiter’s house with a loaded handgun. When they get home from work, jump out and scream at the top of your lungs, ‘WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO A GET A FUCKING JOB THESE DAYS?” and then fire some shots in the airs. Put the gun to the recruiter’s temple and make them read your whole cover letter out loud instead of just skimming it like they usually do. If they cry a little, that’s ok, they think their life is in danger! Always end your cover letter by thanking the recruiter for their time and consideration.

It’s hard to get your resume noticed these days with all the competition and all the companies who don’t even take the time to tell you that you weren’t selected. Use these tips and hopefully you’ll be on your way to the dream job you always wanted!

This isn’t 1936 alright Charlie Chaplin. I’m not talking a lot of color, but maybe a nice underline of blue at the top, or some colored border. Don’t go all Van Gogh on me, but add SOMETHING to catch the eye of the recruiter.

2) No spelling errors or grammar errors.

It’s been said a million times but people still don’t get it. If I’m a recruiter and I see an error, I instantly throw your resume in the trash, cover it in lighter fluid, and drop a match in. To avoid this from happening, get ten different people to check your resume for errors.

3) Keep it to one page

Everyone should be able to condense their resume to one page. Recruiters don’t have time to read a 3-pager. I swear to the lord some people find it necessary to include EVERYTHING that has ever happened to them and their resumes go on FOREVER. One girl’s resume I read ended with, “And before God created the earth, all we had was dark matter and silence.” By the time I had finished reading her resume, she had died of old age and I was 96. Keep it to one page.

4) Leave off Stuff from High School

“You were in your high school’s honor society? Wow, impressive, we’re making you CEO.” That will never happen. High school accomplishments are great to tell your kids one day, but when a recruiter is looking at that paper, they probably don’t care. This advice is for people 20 and above.

5) Make sure your Interests/Personal Section is Unique

The point of the Interests/Personal section is show how unique you are. If you put your interests as reading, movies (and I’ve seen that many a times) etc. , that doesn’t make you stand out. If I see “I was a tenor in a nudist barbershop quartet that performs at the aquarium, in the manatee tank,” then I would bring you in for an interview.

6) Don’t Put “Proficient in Microsoft Word”

This is mainly for Waterloo students with this on their resume. And yes, I had it on there at one point too. But seriously? If you have a pulse you should be proficient in Microsoft Word. Try replacing that line on your resume with a more unique skill.

7) Make sure your formatting looks nice

Please make sure that all your bullet points are lined up and that all the headings are lined up. If I see a resume with formatting errors I assume the person wrote it while they were drunk and also probably has a gambling addiction. No interview for them.

8) Don’t include a picture

This might seem obvious as well, but unless the job you’re applying for is for an actor, model, or prostitute, don’t include a picture. And if you’re a prostitute with a resume, good for you.

9) Don’t Exaggerate or Lie

It may seem like a good idea at the time, but it will come back to haunt you. If you are “Secretary” of some school club and you list one of your duties as “coordinated meetings and budgeted club funds,” when all you really did was sit around with 5 other people and eat pizza, then please remove that from your resume.

10) Correct Contact Info

Make sure your phone number, email, and address are all correct. How much would it suck to have a great resume and never hear back from anyone because you got one number wrong? A lot.

These are my top ten resume tips. If you found them useful, pass this post along to your friends.

I feel very fortunate to have ended up at the University of Waterloo because of their work-study program (even if Jobmine sucks sometimes, their intentions are good.) For those that don’t know, many Waterloo students go to school for 4-months, then go out in the workforce for 4-months to gain real experience.

Here’s why EVERY SCHOOL should do this:

A classroom simply doesn’t prepare you for what’s coming. At all. Sure you may learn about REM sleep cycles and other things but what is that going to do? Maybe you’ll win at Trivial Pursuit some day while you’re out of a job and living in a one-bedroom apartment above a shoe store.

Work is better. Just to learn what it means to move to a new city, have to find a place to live, budget your own money, get up for work, do your own shopping, struggle in new situations, force yourself to make new friends is WAYYYY more important than anything you’ll learn in any type of class, because that class is removed. The real way to learn shit is to be IN the shit. Only after 2 work terms I’ve had to deal with moving in with druggies, bedbugs…TWICE. And now I’m suing a business because they gave me bedbugs and I had to move. Good luck learning to deal with stuff like that in an “Interpersonal Communications Class.”

If university is supposed to prepare you for work life, most schools do a pretty bad job. So thank you Waterloo for teaching me what it’s like to job hunt, be in interviews, and so forth.

To the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other Ivy Leauge schools who I know will read this blog post, do what I say or I’ll sabotage your precious regattas, you rowing bastards.